Welcome to A11y.me!

You've heard about this web accessibility thing and know a thing or two. You manage, design or build websites and someone has asked you, "Is your site accessibile?" You're not sure. You hope so! You scour the web to learn more, but discover it's a wild world of contradicting and incomplete information out there when it comes to accessibility.

Where do you start? Right here.

Here you’ll find several useful online resources related to web accessibility and a brief description on how it will help you. The list will always be concise, current and geared toward starting with accessibility or topics within it.

The Basics

WebAIM: WebAIM has provided comprehensive web accessibility solutions since 1999, and is one of the leading providers of web accessibility expertise internationally. WebAIM is a non-profit organization within the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University. The site brings together a huge collection of information about web accessibility. Most of it is up to date and evergreen enough to help you. The organization's blog tackles many modern-day, evolving topics related to web accessibility.

Treehouse Web Accessibility Videos: A collection of free videos on different topics within web accessibility. There are divided up into an introduction, building a website and building an application.

Section 508: Section 508 requires that Federal agencies’ electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. IT Accessibility and Workforce Division, in the U.S. General Services Administration's Office of Governmentwide Policy, has been charged with the task of educating Federal employees and building the infrastructure necessary to support Section 508 implementation.

W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative: The World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative provides strategies, guidelines and resources to make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is developed through the W3C process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with a goal of proving a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally.

Using NVDA to Evaluate Web Accessibility: This article is designed to help users who are new to NVDA learn the basic controls for testing web content, and to serve as a reference for the occasional NVDA user.

ARIA Primer: Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), defines ways to make Web content and Web applications (especially those developed with Ajax and JavaScript) more accessible to people with disabilities.

Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts: Care must be taken when implementing icon fonts to ensure a great experience for all users. What happens when your font doesn’t load? What happens when @font-face isn’t supported in the browser? The Filament Group shows you how to implement bulletproof font icons.

Tools

UX and Design

The Complete Beginner's Guide to Universal Design: A blog post that describes universal design, a set of considerations made to ensure that a product, service, and/or environment is usable by everyone, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.

Color Palette Accessibility Checker: A tool that allows you to analyze any combination of colors from a palette to see which combinations meet WCAG 2 accessibility specifications. Measures for AA and AAA standards.

Color Extractor Bookmarklet: This is a tool that extracts all of the colors defined in the CSS of a given page and puts those colors in the Color Palette Accessibility Checker.

Color Contrast Analyzer for Chrome: This Chrome extension allows you to analyze text color contrast problems on a web page according to the WCAG 2 color contrast requirements.

Colllor and 0to255: Both are tools that will generate different shades, tints and tones of colors, helpful when creating an accessible color palette.

The Readability Test Tool: The Readability Test Tool provides a quick and easy way to test the readability of your work. It is the most flexible readability software for assessing readability formulas. This aids in making sure your web content is readable and understandable for those people with cognitive disabilities.

Web Developers

Wave: A web tool and Firefox add-on for evaluating the accessibility of web pages.

WCAG 2.0 Mind Map (PDF): A clickable mind-map that helps put the web accessibility guidelines into perspective. This WCAG 2.0-on-a-single-page reference is an alternative way to view the guidelines.

An Alt Text Decision Tree: A decision tree for deciding when and how to implement alt text in your work on the web. This is a work in progress by the editors of the HTML5 spec, but its extremely useful in its current form.

Easy Checks: A set of simple checks developers can make while building websites and applications.

Last updated: 2017-08-02

About

Hi, I'm David A. Kennedy, a front end web developer with a passion for web accessibility. I created Accessibility and Me because it's hard finding the right resources to start learning about web accessibility. Hopefully, the resources here will help you dive into the subject of web accessibility, start to realize why it matters and implement accessibility in your projects.

I plan to keep the list fresh with a mix of resources that both offer broad overviews and and resources that go in-depth, like tutorials and blog posts. It will only ever be one page. Like I said: concise, current and geared toward starting with accessibility. If you have suggestions for the site, you can send an email to me@davidakennedy.com.